How do people choose personal injury lawyers?

If you own or market a personal injury law firm, this question should guide every marketing decision you make.

Ideally, it’s based on actual data.

How have your past clients found you?

What do you know about their journeys?

Unfortunately, many law firms don’t do a great job at collecting this data.

If you don’t have actual data, you might turn to research.

As part of our legal research program partnership with Near Media, we conduct behavioral research.

Put simply, research participants are presented the following:

A close family member who lives nearby has been seriously injured in an accident where someone else was at fault. Thankfully, they’re expected to make a full recovery, but their medical team thinks it will take at least six months. They’re overwhelmed and have asked you to help them explore their legal options against the person at fault for the accident.

On the next screen, you’ll go to Google to find someone that you can speak with about your family member’s situation.

They are asked to “think out loud” and indicate which lawyer or law firm they’d contact first.

If you follow me on various social platforms, you’ve probably heard me talking about this a lot (particularly on LinkedIn).

This research informs many of our strategic decisions.

It also reveals that much of the conventional wisdom about how people find and choose lawyers is, candidly, wrong.

Even firms that consider themselves “data-informed” are being seriously misled by incomplete pictures of client journeys.

This is particularly true for firms that mostly rely on last-click attribution data.

Too often, they’re being misled about the impact of their brand on client acqusition.

For example, in many of the user behavior recordings that I’ve watched personally, what started as a non-brand search, became a brand choice. In other words, users started with a “car accident lawyer near me” type search but chose a law firm because they were already familiar with that firm.

Because of this misunderstanding, firms often make the decision to shift more resources to non-brand marketing and advertising campaigns and less to brand building and reputation campaigns.

This drives down conversion rates and drives up the costs to acquire new client.

In fact, it often completely eliminates the firm from consideration.

I recently had the privilege of presenting at Great Legal Marketing’s Digital Marketing Bootcamp. My talk was titled:

Why Omni-channel Marketing Eats Single-Channel Direct Response Lunch.

Side note, if you haven’t been to Ben Glass Law’s office, you really should make an excuse to go see it. Ben and Brian have built a remarkable physical event space there and they generously invite local organizations to use it, for free!

If you’re interested in the deck, feel free to contact us and we’ll get it to you.

If you don’t have the time to review the whole deck, I’ll share a couple key takeaways here.

First, your attribution system is probably misleading you. If you’re solely relying on your marketing agency’s last-click attribution data, you’re flying blind. But it’s even worse. Your agency may be using that data to justify rising cost-per-client investments in non-brand direct response advertising and marketing.

Second, even if you have significant visibility in non-brand search engine results, without familiarity and reputation, you’re much less likely to be chosen. Familiarity breeds liking. Familiarity with reputation drives choices. I can’t tell you how many user journeys reflected this. Firms that users recognized and had great reputations were the firms that were selected.

Third, users use Google as a research surface, not just as a directory. Most law firm owners and marketers we talk to think that most people follow this journey:

Non-brand “lawyer lookup” search query -> Click or Call -> Hire

And make no mistake, some people do follow this path.

But many follow a much more meandering path filled with query refinements and multiple touch-points.

Honestly, you’d have to see some of these journeys to believe them (and you can if you subscribe to the program).

What becomes absolutely clear is that if you’re overly relying on non-brand direct response advertising, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunity. You’re also very vulnerable to a variety of factors that are driving up your cost per client. It’s an expensive mistake.

You see, when someone is already familiar with your firm when they start their journey, you already have a massive advantage over firms that aren’t familiar. That advantage directly translates to much higher conversion rates. And this difference drastically impacts your cost to acquire clients, even in the non-brand search context.

The day after I presented at GLM, I attended Vista Consulting’s A Seat at the Table event. The purpose of this event was to educate law firms about managed services organizations (MSOs). What does this have to do with how people find and hire lawyers? A lot.

In short, private equity firms are investing in MSOs that handle the marketing for law firms. This means that massive amounts of capital are pouring into lawyer advertising. This includes both offline media and digital media purchases.

These are sophisticated finance and business folks.

They know the value of brand, familiarity, and reputation.

And they’re investing heavily into it.

In my view, local law firms that wish to compete in this climate need rethink their marketing resource allocation. More specifically, local law firms need to switch from single channel direct response to omni-channel marketing.

But “omni-channel” doesn’t have to mean “be everywhere.”

To us, it means implementing attribution systems that provide a more holistic view of client journeys.

It means diversifying marketing and advertising campaigns across many channels and media.

It means delivering messaging that means potential clients are relevant stages of their journeys.

By creating compounding marketing assets, the marginal cost of the next prospect drops over time.

Instead of optimizing to cost per leads, law firms are able to optimize for best experience which leads to dramatically improved conversion.

Brand trust is pre-built and post-case experiences are part of the system. Therefore, referrals compound. Put simply, the math works out much better in the firm’s favor.

If you want to compete in the increasingly competitive and saturated world of personal injury marketing, I encourage you to explore optimizing for most signed cases and conversion rates.

In my opinion, this is the most defensible marketing position.

Trust is future-proof.